AK09 review: The White Body at Skycity Theatre

The White Body uses both text and choreography to explore the meaning of servitude/freedom. Photo / Supplied

Choreographer Ea Sola, who is both French and Vietnamese, "crossed Confucian countries converted to the global economy and thought of La Boetie."

Etienne de la Boetie was born in France in 1530 and wrote his treatise of the politics of obedience sometime in 1550, when still a law student, dying at the age of 33 in 1563. Like Ea Sola he puzzled "how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him."

His is a theory of non-violence, of civil disobedience and some say, a promotion of anarchy.

In her response in The White Body, Ea Sola places two readers at desks on one side of front stage, her musician, with laptop, on the other. A curtain of opaque plastic masks the three figures beyond. Random spots of colour turn out to be items of clothing for wearing or waving or wierdly attaching as part of their largely frenetic movement, inside their plastic prison, embodying life, described in the programme notes, as "a trapped scream." They emerge randomly, rarely and briefly, to paint a mouth in scarlet lipstick, to dangle cigarettes from loutish lips and display coca cola cans.

The two readers read, in French, and at first in whispers. A screen above their heads carries sub-titles. It is difficult to watch both translation and "dancers." The words win.

Well in to the 75 minute performance musician Nguyen Xuan Son presses some keys and his electronic creation adds to the desperation of the twitching bodies and the readers have to raise their voices to a shout. Then it is back to just the words while the plastic curtain is lowered, pushed aside and two of the moving figures assume a robotic duet.

It is intensely interesting, and depressing, that humanity seems not to have moved on at all from what La Boetie observed and protested in his time. Ea Sola serves us well in bringing his essay to light - but her offering remains firmly a stolidly intellectual, rather than, in any way, an aesthetic event.